In June 2004, the newly-renamed eReader (nee Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press) relocated its operations�but not its personnel�to North Carolina. This was only the latest move in a confusing string of buyouts and business shifts that had, over the years, seen one of the first commercial ebook publishers on the ‘net go from self-ownership to NetLibrary to PalmSource to PalmGear like the titular object in a game of hot potato.
When a company relocates its office but not its staff, you’re going to end up with problems�and I don’t just say this because I’m a victim of such a move (having been laid off at the end of June 2004 myself when MCI relocated its customer service operations out of my hometown to consolidate and save money). It’s like burning the village in order to save it: sure, you can continue the renowned brand name, but if the people who made the brand name what it was are no longer there, what have you really got? Sure, you can train the new employees�but if the old employees were the innovators who started the firm, and there’s no continuity, the relocated company is just going to be a shadow of its former self.
Since the move, it seems that the quality of customer service from the company and the quality of its website has been slowly degrading. “The search function seems to be broken,” one user writes. “I search on ‘Cabot’ and don’t come up with her newest book Every Boy’s Got One, and I search on ‘Bujold’ or ‘Paladin’ or ‘Souls’ or ‘Chalion’ and don’t come up with the two Lois McMaster Bujold books you have.”
And I’ve had my own troubles searching their site. In early January, I had to reinstall the operating system on my Powerbook, and so I needed to find and download the free version of their OS X Palm Reader software. When I went to their FAQ, I found I was supposed to
- Go to our home page.
- Scroll down the left side until you reach the eReader download box.
- Select the PalmOS or PocketPC
- Choose “Save this file to disk” option and click “OK.”
The problem is, there’s no “eReader download box” on their homepage. I checked. So I sent a feedback form help request about it, on January 7th.
I received a response. Today. February 3rd, nearly a whole month later, telling me to visit a download page to get that software.
Now, I know good customer service. Customer service has been my job, for the last several years�first as a cashier at Kmart, then as a phone CS rep at MCI, and now as a phone/chat/email rep at a small web-hosting company. Good customer service is getting back to your customers, or your potential customers, as quickly as possible�especially when all you need to tell them is “go to this URL to find that software you’re looking for.”
They should have been able to do that in hours. It took them 27 days. And adding insult to injury, after all this time their FAQ still provides the same broken instructions I quoted above.
I have fond memories of the days when eReader still went by Peanut Press. They had one of the best document reading software packages for the Palm from the very beginning, and have only improved it over time (as well as expanded it to other platforms). They had a very good non-intrusive form of Digital Rights Management that didn’t get in the way of reading, and a very good selection of ebooks; in fact, the first e-book I ever bought was their early version of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. They had an easy-to-use system for marking up books into that format, too; if you knew how to do HTML, you could learn to do Peanut Markup Language and do almost everything that their professional publishing package could. They also had some of the most helpful employees you could ever find; one of them even made available to me a test copy of a Linux-only version of the PML ebook compiler when I found the Java one didn’t quite do everything I needed. Oh, and they had responsive customer service, too; I could usually get an answer back within a couple of days at the longest.
It makes me sad that they’ve been bought out into a hollow shell of what they used to be, in the name of product convergence for a Palm software vendor.
Oh well. At least we still have Baen.
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